This is a follow-up to the last posting I wrote that covered the quest for training, either from within or outside your organization. Today I'll discuss the other side of the coin because I have worked in spaces and with various individuals where training just wasn't important.

These individuals were excellent at the jobs they'd been hired to do, and they were highly satisfied with those jobs. They had no desire for more training or even advancement. I don't have an issue with that. Certainly, I’d rather interact with a fantastic storage admin or route/switch engineer with no desire for career mobility than the engineer who’d been in the role for two months and had their sights set on the next role already. I’d be likely to get solid advice and correct addressing of issues by the engineer who’d been doing that job for years.

But, and this is important, what would happen if the organization changed direction. The Route/Switch guy who knows Cisco inside and out may be left in the dust if he refused to learn Arista, (for example) when the infrastructure changes hands, and the organization changes platform. Some of these decisions are made with no regard to existing talent. Or, if as an enterprise, they moved from expansion to their on-premises VMware environment to a cloud-first mentality? Those who refuse to learn will be left by the wayside.

Just like a shark dying if it doesn't move forward, so will a legacy IT pro lose their status if they don’t move forward.

I’ve been in environments where people were siloed to the extent that they never needed to do anything outside their scope. Say, for example, a mainframe coder. And yet, for the life of the mainframe in that environment, they were going to stay valuable to the organization. These skills are not consistent with the growth in the industry. Who really is developing their mainframe skills today? But, that doesn’t mean that they intrinsically have no impetus to move forward. They actually do, and should. Because, while it’s hard to do away with a mainframe, it’s been known to happen.

Obviously, my advice is to grow your skills, by hook or by crook. To learn outside your standard scope is beneficial in all ways. Even if you don’t use the new tech that you’re learning, you may be able to benefit the older tech on which you currently work by leveraging some of your newly gained knowledge.

As usual, I’m an advocate for taking whatever training interests you. I’d go beyond that to say that there are many ways to leverage free training portals, and programs to benefit you and your organization beyond those that have been sanctioned specifically by the organization. Spread your wings, seek out ways to better yourself, and in this, as in life, I’d pass on the following advice: Always try to do something beneficial every day. At least one thing that will place you on the moving forward path, and not let you die like a shark rendered stationary.

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